In this issue we take the opportunity to dissect the mind of a truly avant garde poet. During this ice age of hyper-linked mass media culture Hugh is one of the few original voices we've heard. Dare you put your ear to the cutting edge? Read below for his thoughts, accompanied by three new poems!

jl: How long have you been writing?  What is your background/training?

ht: I've been writing poetry in fits and starts for my own enjoyment since I was fifteen.  My ninth grade English teacher was a little, lively, urbane woman who had a way of making writing seem like a sensual (erotic) adventure.  At forty-six, I still think of writing as a necessary pleasure of living.  I've been regularly submitting work for publication since around 1992, about my second year of my enrollment in the doctoral program in English at Oklahoma State.
 
I studied writing poetry under Mark Cox and writing fiction under Gordon Weaver.   I was trained to write free verse narrative consistent with the poetry in New American Poets of the Nineties edited by Jack Myers and Roger Weingarten and Contemporary American Poetry edited by A. Poulin.  The program at Oklahoma State emphasized thinking of poetry as a rhetoric.  You make craft decisions based on the effects you want to achieve in the reader.  It's a practical, straightforward approach to writing. 

I've been working in experimental forms since I graduated in 1996.  Most of my current work is not recognizable in terms of the poetry I was trained to write.

jl: Is there any one writer or movement which has had the strongest influence over your work?  Do artists in other mediums influence you?

ht: The strongest influences were Jackson Mac Low and the language poets. Especially Mac Low.  He looks at writing more like modernist visual artists often look  at their works, as processes to engage in or as objects in themselves rather than means to convey a "message" to a reader. Mac Low says he releases control of the meaning of the work to the reader.  To me this approach suggests the work of the Abstract Expressionists and the "hazardous" combines of Robert Rauschenberg — the art of that generation.

Mac Low's writing  provided an alternative to poetry as rhetoric.  Most of the time when I write I don't want to "say" anything.  Instead I want to immerse myself in a process of language or follow where an arbitrary procedure takes me. Action writing like action painting.  My stuff is "expressionist" in the sense that I try to draw on a primary process of language, my language meat machine rather than speaking with a self-conscious voice.  Though I write normal poetry from time to time, what I usually try to do these days is make a buck in the black market below the cultural economy of the self, spiritual profiteering in the execrable sublime.

jl: How would you define your style?

ht: I suppose the most generous way to describe the style of these poems is anti-lyrical.  A monster is speaking that emerges from such procedures as the S + 7 that changed my "Opinion of the Internal Paramour" into "Opium of the Interim Paralysis," a monster born from the ill-temper repressed in a thousand polite, middle-brow poetry readings.  I think of De Kooning's Woman.  The results of this approach are often loutish, cartoonish, and clogged, but it's company I'm comfortable in and where I have more fun.

Opium of the Interim Paralysis

Hunches and the antitheses they secreted freshly burned in your head
becoming the radiant purgatory you filled journals with.
This ghetto of necromancy
reverberates into a hurdy-gurdy for a hanky-panky,
fireproof and paltry as a newborn contagion—
a punishment between your ears more furious
than when you scraped that vicious epigram
from the package in your counterfeit hour
or hacked over tailwinds
for the nifty dawn's chiaroscuro protocol.
Evasively eventful this design for a classy eclogue
wallows.  The waterworks of this inanity
courses over you with a vainglorious unhappiness
which will be as clogged as you ever get with the matting.

We do what we can for payloads
for quantum hothouse backgammon sessions
remunerating the patriarch of roulette,
the prince of the Ferris Wheel—
or pussyfooting upon the surge
of slavery's pontoon in a lousy age—
morbidly and lethally boosted,
network thorny with some sort of chauvinism,
upon the listless ahoy and damn,
down the fishy and omnivorous sink,
a shabby lie for motorized superegos.

Huge drift accelerates
the alike-kosher mirage from Snout Whistle
while the lowbrow wakes on the bakery roof
above the wrappers and shellfish offal of schizophrenia
or someone is mugged
in the dopey romance
fresh from the bowels of the oligarchy
and you are doing the week's laundry
when you wail
with an ague of coiled eternities
in your notes and movements.

One-horse afterthought you nourish.
It's been foul decay with roaches
to remit you for your wile and heat,
foul decay with roaches
to reckon your design.

[S+7 of my poem "Opinion of the Interior Paramour"]

jl: Please describe your creative process for us.

ht: I either compose intuitively and off-set the product with various procedures, or I reverse the process generating language with a procedure and impose an intuitive pattern on it.  Ideas for the procedures come from a variety of sources.  I often use Mac Low's diastic method and exercises from the experiments list at the Electronic Poetry Center.

jl: Does your writing environment — hometown, daily life — affect your writing?

ht: Yes, very much so.  In specific projects I sometimes use language from my social environment: popular publications such as newspapers and church newsletters or the language people happen to be using at moments when I'm paying attention.  I got into trouble at a party a couple of years ago doing that attention thing.

My sensibility was spawned in the lively babble of my culture: Spiderman and Protestant Christianity and William Faulkner and about a hundred thousand hours of movies and television.

My instincts are populist.  I admire well wrought literature, but I think Michel Foucault was right about institutions using masterpieces to control and limit creativity.  As an educator, I think it's a damn shame so many otherwise literate people have been convinced they can't be creative.
 
I work at a job (assistant professor of English) that ties promotion and tenure to collecting publishing credits, and I was granted relief time from teaching to research experimental forms of poetry, which proved to be a very valuable opportunity, and Jerry Bradley who is the creative writing chair of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association is very broad-minded and gives me a chance to read my work at their conference in Albuquerque every year.  At the same time, in my immediate professional and cultural environment, there is almost a complete lack of interest in the type of writing I do, which is understandable.  Most of the attention and support are going to go to conventional writing.  There's no point in complaining, but it does make what I do something of a monastic enterprise, and there are certain benefits from that. You practice the discipline of making your validation for what you do internal rather external, which is where it should come from anyway. The current popularity of collaboration not withstanding, writing still tends to be solitary, and you either like the solitude or you don't.  Too much attention makes loners act goofy.  There's ample video evidence of this.  Look at Galway Kinnell in front of a camera.

Statistical Formulas

Cane's ivory
lace-etched head fifty times.
Gore clogs
snowflakes.

Intensive care mumbles
credit cards.

No rider or saddle
white horse gallops
sheriff's car.
Night-shift deputyhanging t-shirt.

Cash liberated
for free circulation.
Tourist-shop mojo bag
leadens local golden boy.

Coughing this fall,
courtyard in unison
reals recruiting sergeants,
Mexican haze.
Certainly not uncontrollable savages!

Contagious wind
presses, waves
wheat fields

litter of  dead bankers,
backstabbers, bosses.

Television moves
up and down the wall, shut eyes,
feign cynicism,
tuck the perimeter inward.

Steak knife slices
hand of
wrong syllable,

thus prayers and playoffs.

Certificate in the mail.
Riderless bike dawn .

jl: What do you perceive as the greatest challenges for modern poets?  What challenges have you faced?

ht: Artists have to resist what Jed Rasula calls institutional "voice overs," that glacial drift that distorts cultural production to serve dominant ideologies, cutting and snipping social protest songs to sell luxury cars.  But maybe that's true only of writers like me who try to make space for their practice within or beside the institutions where they make a living.  If the exhibit of avant garde writing at Ohio State this past July is representative, experimental writing is quite healthy.

My biggest challenge — nothing new to writers — is to prevent the other areas of my life from overwhelming me.  I can become so busy with my teaching duties and report this and committee that I don't get to the creative work for weeks, sometimes months.

Then there's the problem of keeping the practice vigorous through cross-fertilization, seeing what other people do so I can borrow (steal) their ideas for my own work.  I rely on journals like Chain, Lost and Found Times, Poethia, and The Dream People.  I liked Chain, #4, the proceduralist issue.  "REARS ITS UGLY HEAD" was based on Joan Retallack's "The Blue Stare," from that issue.

jl: Do you have a favorite poem from your body of work, and if so could you please describe it for us?

ht: Not a favorite as such, but "Light in August Poem," which was accepted for POTEPOETZINE, was a breakthrough for me.  I began with a diastic assemblage drawn from Faulkner's Light in August and "talked" beyond the sense of the language, recombining the word parts and adding expressive punctuation, white space, and capitalization.  A colleague described it as warmed over e. e. cummings, but I feel it opened up a new direction for my practice.  "First Arapaho Poem" was composed the same way.

First Arapaho Poem

H.     Ew     a.saLO.//nE an
DLO          nEly
no f. OR M.AN    d ca nn.
     EV .erbe. MAD e
"Ho//     Wd [EE *PAReTh *ewall-around is good
AT     E          .rs.
allegorical is good-for-nothing "THEym] [aybev[    
eryd. EE (p)
T.] hey cho .s. et /he li .tt. lete
al . . .
[eVEN] lar geRw. ]ATeB[ IrD /s/
C. a       /ll/ edfo][     rthes          WANs.
C. a     R     e     f     U     L     ,"
cRe/ \ATed thrEE k..ind sofw\\ aTERBe
I               I have notice to echoings
somet          HING .t./     hat[[ can l         
iv          E
a bird."
an     .dthe.     [Bi]          rdsw
ERE flOAting
an     .dthe.     ERE can bebe i
naswi THOU twings."
Ma          n-aB\ Ovek Newbe .tt.
er I geld them frumps
S /ee/," HEs a .ID.
doNer IGHT,
wa     /iti/     *ng
hEAR     dTHe. t     URT     le's* legs
ea     RTHO ntohim
done."
MAK     keaw OrLD allied is goofy
ea     R          /thth/     AtF     la
T PiPe /h/ eld
bir     dss ]aton iT
MAD eam /anan/ daw OM/ANan/ dab
Uf faloall-out is gory
toge THerfOR TH /ere/ ST oft IME
                               
[Sources:Arapaho songs and creation myth]

jl: Where can readers find more of your work?

ht: I'm not widely published and don't have a book yet.  But my poems have appeared in Poethia, archived at burningpress.org, The Lost and Found Times, and, of course, previous issues of The Dream People.

More of Hugh's work can be found in the Best of the Dream People Poets chapbook, available now in our online store!